Restless Heart

by Denise Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

She was married to a good man, and desperately in love with someone else! The conflict between reason and emotion when restless youth is forced to choose between romantic love and unromantic security. A captivating love story from the 100-million-copy bestselling Queen of Romance, first published in 1938, and available now for the first time in eBook.

Release date: October 16, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 368

Sample

WHEN Julia Daunt woke up on the 31st March, looked at the man who was still asleep in the bed beside her, realised that she was married to him and was not in the least bit in love, she was miserable.

She was not shocked, because she never had imagined that she was still in love with Bill. But during their three years together she had deluded herself into believing that she did not want anybody else. This morning she knew definitely that she was missing something in life and it was distinctly unpleasant, to say nothing of depressing to dwell on the fact that her married life, with its lack of fulfilment, might last for another thirty years.

The room was still darkish, but she could see the outline of Bill’s figure and a fair, tousled head and hear the somewhat heavy breathing to which she had never quite grown accustomed. From the day of her marriage she had decided that these heavy breathings might at any moment develop into snores, and that anyhow, sounds other than those made by oneself were objectionable in the night. Certainly such sounds could never be tolerated at closer quarters. Hence the disposal of their original large bed; a disposal accompanied by groans and protests from Bill who liked, he said, being kept warm on a winter’s night. But Julia was no girl to turn herself into any man’s hot-water bottle. So about two months after they had settled in the cottage, the double bed went back to the shop where it was purchased and was replaced by the “twins”, which Julia found far less formidable.

She had tried to pacify Bill by pointing out that his psychology was at fault in preferring the other. Too much familiarity was bound to breed contempt, and the space between the “twins” need not be regarded as a dividing line expressing reluctance on either side. It was merely a pleasant gulf which either could cross at will, at the same time retaining some privacy.

To which he had not agreed, because Bill never did regard himself as “modern” about Julia. He was, he acclaimed, quite old-fashioned in his undivided love for her. But he agreed to the “twins” after some coaxing, and the assurances which Julia gave him that the alteration would increase rather than decrease her ardour.

This morning she lay snuggled under the bedclothes, the blanket drawn well up under her chin because it was cold, listened to the respirations of her husband, and was quite certain that the foot between the two beds was not enough. That a wall between would not have been enough, since to every four walls of a room there is always a door. That separate houses would be preferable. In other words, that she didn’t want to live with Bill any more.

Now Julia was not a woman with a flimsy brain, nor one who made hasty decisions. She was of the thinking kind. She could not be called a deep thinker, but she liked to get to the bottom of subjects that perplexed her, and felt it essential that she should investigate thoroughly the unattractive discovery which she had made upon waking to-day.

Why wasn’t she happy with Bill any more?

She wasn’t in love with anybody else. But she had men friends and liked men. She had been brought up with a lot of brothers and cousins and had learnt to shoot and ride to hounds when she was a small girl living up in Leicestershire. And men liked her. She was good to look at and was conscious of all her best points. She considered it foolish for a woman to ignore the consciousness of her own beauty. She knew that she had a pretty, petite figure, with delightful curves where they were meant to be, a good skin, pale, perfect with the correct amount of make-up. Her hair was a curious tobacco-colour. She wore it short and refused to have it waved or curled. It was cut straight with a gamine fringe. The dark hazel eyes could melt when she was in a soft mood, or flash the coldest of scorn in a hard one. Bill said he took his cue from the expression in her eyes. She looked eighteen instead of twenty-five. She had a quick wit and ready humour.

She had had one particular affair before she married Bill. But she had put that man out of her life and out of her mind. Now there was a man—but she wasn’t going to allow herself to think about Ivor Bent this morning. He was most attractive and she had had a very amusing conversation with him at the Mackenzies’ party last night. But he was married and had two children and was best not thought about. One could control one’s thoughts up to a point. Only up to a point, of course, and inevitably she would recall interesting little details about Ivor Bent: his extreme slenderness—the antithesis of Bill’s large, bony frame. The pallor of his face, the blackness of his hair, and the rapier-like dart of his searching, discontented eyes. The way he had of talking very quickly, smoking quickly, flicking the ash all over the floor with total disregard for ash-trays and suddenly breaking into puckish laughter when you said something funny.

But enough of Ivor Bent. She was supposed to be thinking about Bill and why she wasn’t happy with him any more. And it certainly was not because of a man she had only just met and was not likely to meet again.

What had happened yesterday to annoy her? Nothing more than usual. Bill worked in the garden all day. He was mad about it. When they had bought this Tudor cottage in Lewes two years ago they had found quite a pretty garden ready-made. But Bill had had it all up. He drove the jobbing gardener, who bore the fitting name of Orchard, to distraction, by pulling up every bed he saw, grassing it over, and cutting up the turf. He moved the bird bath. He destroyed pathways and created new ones. He lifted well-established shrubs to other parts of the garden because he had his own ideas about designing. He would have gone without meals if Julia had not screamed at him from the doorway, and insisted upon his coming in to eat.

Things should never be allowed to become obsessions, she told him. And yet it was a healthy obsession and she supposed she had no right to discourage it. He had money of his own—enough to make him independent. Bill had come into her life at a crucial right moment. Her father had just died and the big country home in which they lived was being sold. She and her mother were settling in a London flat.

Just before they left Leicester, Bill had met Julia, who was having a few days hunting with friends. She had marked him out that day in the field, attracted by his look of strength and vigour. And later, when she looked into his nice blue eyes she saw an admiration and sympathy which she needed. She was just getting over an affair with a man older than herself, which had not proved satisfactory and had resulted in his marrying somebody else. So close upon the heels of this disaster, Julia found it difficult to fall in love with Bill, but easy to love him.

When he asked her to marry him, she told him frankly that she was not in love. But he, having in his quiet fashion determined to make Julia his wife, and certain that she was the woman of his dreams, would take no refusal.

“I love you more than I can possibly tell you,” he said, “and so much that I shall make you love me in time if you’ll only give me a chance.”

Twice she refused him. From Leicester to London he pursued her. And gradually he became a necessity. She was lost and lonely without him. Then her mother died, and that was Bill’s big opportunity.

Julia married him.

“I am willing to take the risk, darling,” he had said on the day they drove to Caxton Hall together about a licence.

And she had said:

“Even of me falling in love with somebody—afterwards?”

He had laughed happily and answered:

“I won’t let you. I’ll make you so happy that you won’t want anybody else. Besides, you’re not the sort of woman to let a fellow down.”

That had made her laugh and weep together in his arms.

But this morning she was nearer tears than laughter as she looked back upon the three years of her marriage. For it was a dilemma. She had been happy—quite gloriously happy during their honeymoon, which they spent wandering through Spain and Morocco. And even more content once they had settled down here in their country cottage. But it had been a sort of surface contentment, she believed. Like the smoothness of a piece of water which can be ruffled by a breath of wind. Bill seemed more in love than ever after marriage. But Julia began to wonder if she would ever know that glorious, thrilling madness which the poets sang about, and called “love”.

If, fundamentally, she was unsatisfied, she could not now imagine a life apart from Bill. They were good companions. He was a little solid and British, a little lacking, perhaps, in that spice of the devil which she had always liked in men.

He had taken a risk when he had married her, and that was what he was forgetting, Julia thought. She wanted to see Ivor Bent again—badly! But she mustn’t think about Ivor. She must go on thinking about Bill.

The room was growing lighter.

She had been very happy with Bill when they had turned “Katherine’s”, their cottage near Lewes, into the perfect home.

In their Jag, they could make the West End in an hour and ten minutes, so that they could get up to a show or a dance with the greatest of ease, and drive back, unless they wanted to stay a night. And Julia was not far from any of her cherished racecourses—Lewes, Lingfield, Brighton or Plumpton. “Katherine’s” was situated almost in the centre of them all. It was said to have belonged to Katherine of Aragon.

It was a lamb of a place. Julia had had a grand time furnishing it. One could do so much with those white plastered walls and oak beams. They had had all the oak pickled to a silver grey and a lot of old furniture toned down to the same colour. Bill was nothing if not generous, and he gave her carte-blanche when she set about making their home. They put in central heating.

Bill hated radiators. But he put up with them for Julia’s sake. And he could never accuse her of being “stuffy”, because she liked fresh air.

She took tremendous walks with the two Alsatians Bill had bought for her when they first came to “Katherine’s” and liked to drive up to the Downs, park the car, and walk with the dogs for miles upon the springy turf, getting a keen satisfaction out of the sense of space and distance when she could look down upon the Sussex Weald. It was beautiful up there with the wind against one’s face, and great clouds scudding across the sky, and the land set out like a chequerboard, oblongs of brown ploughed field, green meadows, and the dark prune of woods.

They had been awfully happy turning “Katherine’s” into the perfect home. This room was lovely with its queer, odd casements, some of them still retaining the original diamond panes which they guarded jealously.

Julia could now see the travelling clock on the table between her bed and Bill’s. It was seven o’clock. She heard Alice, the daily, moving about in the drawing-room below, pulling curtains. In another half-hour she would come up with the tea and let in Snoopy and Jealous, the two Alsatians, and they would both ignore Bill’s bed and bound on to hers, and cover her with fawning protestations of worship. They were darlings, particularly Jealous, the dog. From a tiny puppy he had always shown his disapproval when Snoopy, the bitch, received any attention. And she had said to him: “Jealous!” so many times that it had developed into his name.

This was an hour at which Julia was rarely awake, for she was one to sleep late. But her thoughts and feelings about Bill had troubled her into this unusual state of mental activity at such an early hour. So the room looked a little unfamiliar in the pale light of the early morning. Rather nice, subduing the peach of the glossy William and Mary chintz and the brocades on the four Queen Anne chairs, which Julia had had pickled, to the horror of the dealer who sold them to her.

Why wasn’t she happy with Bill any more?

The roving eye of Julia went back to the recumbent figure of her husband and there flashed through her brain the unattractive answer to this question which had troubled her since she awakened.

“Because you’re bored with him.”

So unattractive did the answer appear to the mind of Julia, a mind which disdained the average discontented married woman she met, Julia threw off the bedclothes and seized her dressing-gown.

Hands in her pockets she looked gloomily out at the garden. A faint greyish mist clung to the tops of the trees and wreathed itself round the ornamental pond which Bill had just finished making. It was ready prepared for lilies and goldfish. Irregular steps of old greenish stone ran up from the pond to a grass bank and thence to the tennis court which was flanked by a fine old yew hedge. Beyond lay green fields and a fringe of wood.

She turned from the scene of the misty garden and looked back at her beautiful bedroom and thought:

“Everything is lovely. Everything is as I wanted it; as I still want it. But something is gone—a sort of contentment—and I want that back more than anything. …”

Further thoughts of the kind were prevented by the arrival of Alice with the tea. Julia must have been awake, indulging in all this reflection much longer than she had thought. Followed by Alice with the tray, came Snoopy and Jealous, bounding joyously into the room.

Julia enveloped Jealous with both arms, laid her cheek against his muzzle and said:

“You’re Julia’s darling boy.”

Snoopy sprang up on to the bed and seated herself with a thud upon Bill’s stomach. Bill thereupon woke up with a yell, heard Julia’s words and without opening his eyes, said:

“Well, thank God I’m somebody’s darling boy.”

Julia pushed the Alsatian away from her, ran her fingers through her hair, and turned to her husband.

“I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Jealous.”

Bill Daunt, groaning under the weight of the other Alsatian who licked his face, sat up.

“Huh! What about saying something nice to me?”

“I’m not in the mood to make nice speeches.”

Daunt suddenly became wide awake, rubbed the back of his tousled head, and gave his wife a look of mild reproach.

“Now what’s bitten you, darling? You made a nice speech to Jealous, didn’t you?”

Julia gave him a look of scorn and he put up a warning hand.

“Don’t tell me that the more you see of men the more you love dogs.”

“Oh, shut up and give me a cigarette.”

He flung a packet at her and lay back on his pillow.

“You’re not in one of your sweetest moods. I shall go to sleep again.”

Julia lit a cigarette, flung the burnt match at Bill, and departed into the bathroom. He called out after her, resentfully:

“You’ve got a hangover.”

She shouted back through the noise of running water:

“Your psychology is as stupid as that awful triangular rose bed you’ve dug outside the dining-room window. Fill it with antirrhinums and it’ll look like one of those tatty affairs you see in a public park.”

That piece of contempt for his gardening cut Bill to the heart. He rose from his bed, knocking Snoopy off the edge, hitched up his pyjamas, and followed his wife to the bathroom.

“Well I must say that’s a wretched remark to make after all the trouble I’ve taken with the garden,” he said.

Julia had removed her wrapper and her silk pyjamas. The bathroom was warm from the pipes and she stood naked in front of the mirror brushing her teeth. She was lovely undressed. She had small firm breasts, and firm, slim flanks. Her body was a warm white all over, without any suggestion of “gooseflesh”. She saw Bill’s reflection in the mirror, shook back the tobacco-brown hair which was falling into her eyes and spluttered at him through a froth of toothpaste:

“Do get out!”

He went but he had to be good-tempered and forgiving and bring her her cup of tea. It irritated her but she said, meekly:

“Thank you very much, Bill.”

“Not at all,” said Bill, and walked away.

When he strolled into her room ready dressed for the day’s work in old grey flannels and check flannel shirt of a shade of blue which matched his eyes, Julia, feeling guilty, became unaccustomedly demonstrative. She held out a hand to him.

“I was beastly just now.”

He did what was expected of Bill. He came straight up, took the hand, and kissed it with an old-fashioned courtesy, which was, somehow, indicative of Bill’s nature. Julia had often told him that he had an Edwardian soul.

“That’s right, Ju. But why were you cross?”

She let him hold the hand and stared at the floor.

“I don’t know,” she said miserably.

“Have I done anything?”

“Nothing.”

A healthy odour of soap, toothpaste, and tobacco emanated from Bill. And nobody knew better than Julia that he had a healthy mi. . .